Well, for my 500th read book on goodreads, I decided to pick something that I'd been saving for a while, and I settled on Shirley, which was the last Charlotte Brontë novel I had left to read.

Shirley is full of my favorite Charlotte Brontë things, namely feminist social agitation and characters who step outside their expected gender roles. Shirley is obviously the best part of Shirley--she deserves a spot on the list of greatest characters of all time. Supposedly Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell that Shirley was what her sister Emily would have been "had she been placed in health and prosperity," but my unvetted personal opinion is that Shirley is what Jane Eyre would have been had she been placed in health and prosperity.

Shirley is not going to displace my current favorite Brontë novel (that would be hard to do), but it does seem like the novel that has the most of Charlotte in it, and for that reason alone it is worthy of being loved. Through the book there's also this undercurrent of desire to return to an earlier, happier time, which, when you think about how all the remaining Brontë siblings died while Shirley was being written, makes the book feel sadder than it appears on the surface.